I'm having difficulty tracking all the different parts of this thread, and trying to work out what consensus, if any, is being reached.
I believe the following points are important, but for anyone can't be arsed to read them all, the summary is at the bottom... Think about the purpose of the CDs. Some of the people who have been posting to the list *seem* to be forgetting to do this. As far as I can see, the purpose of a Debian CD is *not* primarily to enable installation by booting from the CD, but rather to enable installation/ recovery with minimal other resources required (like: bandwidth+time for a massive download, a LAN+knowledge to use it for install, hundreds of floppies etc.) Booting from CD and installing from the provided archive may often be the most convenient way to do things, but not always. The next most common option in my experience is to create boot floppies from the CD using another machine (often running windows). Having booted from the first floppy, the aim is then to start using the CD as soon as possible. In some cases, the CD may be merely the means to carry the archive around - installation to be done with floppies created on another machine, then completed via a (possibly dialup) network connection. Aside: were it not for the flexibility of the Debian installtion process, I'd probably still be using slackware right now. I had previously been put off by the fact that stable appeared to be rather out-of-date, and the err, cough, interface to ds... cough... was a little unf... cough. I was able to install onto a 486-50 laptop with 4MB RAM using 7 floppies (created on a slackware box) followed by nfs over PLIP (no Adam, no network either). None of the other major distributions would install on that box *at all*. Having installed the system, and been forced to learn a little bit about dselect, I was converted. Think about people all over the world with shite hardware, no bandwidth to speak of, and little knowledge. If I can give someone like that a CD and they can get it working *somehow*, then that's a big win. I'm hoping to be shipping a load of old hardware over to some friends in Tanzania soon (note: It appears MS are just starting to think about getting their teeth into that kind of market - starting with the civil service which apparently currently uses ripped-off ms stuff). If I'm going to chuck a bunch of CDs in with the machines, they need to be absolutely self-contained. Ability to install by building floppies from CD#1 is *essential*, no arsing about downloading base tarballs from god-knows-where. Summary: If including what's necessary to enable that is "a waste of space", well, actually, maybe the whole CD thing is a waste of space too - why not just distribute a post-it note with "see http://www.debian.org"; on it and let them download it all. Cheers, Nick -- Nick Phillips -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't relax! It's only your tension that's holding you together.
